Flame Towers light up Baku's historic skyline

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The Flame Towers, Baku – The new Flame Towers in Baku, Azerbaijan, designed by HOK International, were instantly popular, but posed several challenges to their makers.

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Construction was halted at one point as engineers battled Baku's frequent gale-force winds while also taking into consideration the area's seismic activity.

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Architect Barry Hughes also wanted to protect Baku's historic architecture, while satisfying his client's brief. "You go, 'I'd really like to not screw this up, because it is really beautiful,' [but] you're trying to do something new and aspirational to represent the future."

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Beneath the towers is a retail space with a honeycomb roof (as this CGI shows). "A lot of our buildings are pragmatic, developer-led buildings, but we're trying to do something spiritual and sculptural," says Hughes.

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Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp – The building Hughes most wishes he had built is Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut chapel in Ronchamp, France.

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Completed in 1954, Hughes admires its freeform abstraction, and the processional route that visitors must take to get there.

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GB Le Corbu Ronchamp greenery – The processional route that visitors take to get there is typical of Corbusier, says Hughes, who was inspired by the Parthenon.

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"[Henry David] Thoreau said: 'Man will inevitably fail, so aim high'," Hughes says. "That's true of architecture: if you're not aiming high, you're probably not going to fail, but you're not going to succeed as much as you'd like either."

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Story highlights

Texas-born architect Barry Hughes picks the Flame Towers in Baku as his favorite building

Building towers was a challenge says Hughes and had to be weighted to withstand earthquakes

Hughes wishes he had designed Notre Dame du Haut, a concrete Catholic chapel in Ronchamp, France

Designed by Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier, the modernist building was completed in 1954

Baku has been a citadel amidst potentially destabilizing forces for centuries, routinely blasted by gale-force winds, seismic activity and positioned near one of the world's largest and most coveted oil reserves.

But, having declared independence and with the establishment of a lucrative oil pipeline, Azerbaijan now has its sights set firmly on urban renewal in its capital.

This year, the astonishing Flame Towers project was completed by global architecture giant HOK, creating a building that developers hoped would become an icon for Baku's coastal skyline.

Texan-born Barry Hughes, Vice President of HOK, says building an "icon" is one of the most intimidating briefs for an architect.

"It's probably dangerous to try to do something iconic. The biggest challenge a designer faces is that blank sheet of paper," he says, "and if you pile on the idea that you want something iconic ..."

Whether your tower looks like a flame, or merely evokes the concept, comes down, it seems, to how much it flickers at the roof line, and Hughes says a dedicated team worked exclusively on refining the towers' quiffs.

"They had long conversations about that moment when a candle is burning, the gestural moment when it catches the wind. Somebody drew that a hundred times in the computer, and once that's drawn it gets passed through different programs, and the contractors have to further rationalize it."

The towers posed numerous other challenges. They had to be weighted to withstand potential earthquakes, and parts needed to be constructed without the use of cranes, due to Baku's harsh winds.

The site is large, but dense, containing offices, a hotel and residential apartments above a shopping mall, above a parking lot. "Making all those spaces work in tandem was the biggest engineering challenge of all," Hughes admits.

But, standing at the top of one tower shortly before the building was completed, Hughes found himself marveling at another unexpected feat.

"Rare is the place in the world where you can stand in one tower ... and have two other towers that seem to form a space that I wasn't clever enough to anticipate," he says. "Maybe I was just drunk on the accomplishment but that space up there is really magical."

"Somebody will have a hotel room or office where they'll look across and be part of those three objects in the sky and that, for me, is kind of spiritual."

The building Hughes most wishes he'd designed is the Notre Dame du Haut, a concrete Catholic chapel in Ronchamp, France, designed by Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier.

Completed in 1954, long before the advent of computer-aided design, the chapel's roof and walls curve and slope in response to the hill on which they sit.

Today, many architects would find such complexity impossible to execute without the aid of computer, Hughes says.

"Within the context of that period, I think it's really a piece of sculpture."

He particularly admires the approach to the chapel, which winds up a hill and past some trees.

"When I went there, it was one of those charmingly underdone things. That's true of a lot of Corbu's work -- you have to work to get there. That processional route is special and comes from Corbusier looking at the Parthenon."

Hughes believes the inflection of humanity in Corbusier's work is what makes him relevant today.

"Modernists were really fascinated with the machine, and buildings as machines for living. I find that idea compelling but at the same time, machines can be soulless, and we're now in an age where we expect our machines to have a little spirit," he said.

"Corbusier was starting to do that in his later work. Mid-Corbusier was very angular, but Ronchamp is more gestural and evocative. You walk up and go 'oh, wow!' You get that lump in your throat. Which goes back to what everybody's trying to do when they start with that blank sheet of paper."